Love, God, Murder is a Johnny Cash compilation box set, released on this date in May 2000. It features three themed CDs of songs Cash chose from his catalog. Love features relationship songs, mostly written for June Carter Cash. God is a collection of Gospel and spiritual songs. Murder features another recurring topic of Cash’s career, and perhaps his favorite subject, but one that he encouraged people “not to go out and do”. Each album was also released separately on the same day. In 2004 Life, a fourth compilation was released.

Although the three albums within the box set are compilations, they demonstrate Cash’s lifelong affection for releasing concept albums. Examples of previous Cash albums based around a common theme include Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian (1964), Sings the Ballads of the True West (1965), America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song (1972) and The Rambler (1977).

Each of the three discs contains liner notes by a celebrity. Love has liner notes by Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash, U2’s frontman Bono contributes liner notes for God, and Murder’s liner notes are by film director Quentin Tarantino.

REVIEW

by Richie Unterberger, allmusic

Each of the three CDs in this box set are comprised of 16 songs devoted to a single theme: love, God, and murder, of course. And each of the three CDs is available separately should you not have a yen for one or two of the discs. Certainly there is a lot of notable music on this box, as it was personally chosen by Cash himself from recordings spanning the mid-’50s to the mid-’90s, mostly heavily weighting the 1955-70 period. There are a few well-known classics here that virtually anyone considering buying this will already know (and probably have), like “I Walk the Line,” “I Still Miss Someone,” “Ring of Fire,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “The Long Black Veil.” The emphasis, however, is on LP tracks, B-sides, and live recordings that probably won’t be familiar to the moderate Cash fan; there are also three mid-’60s tracks previously unreleased in the U.S., though none of them are particularly outstanding. Some of those obscure songs are excellent (“Oh, What a Dream,” the brutal hangman humor of “Joe Bean,” “Mister Garfield”) and almost all of them are worth hearing. And each of the CDs is decorated by liner notes from Cash and a celebrity (his wife June Carter for Love, Bono of U2 for God, and director Quentin Tarantino for Murder). The question still nags: who exactly will find this box wholly satisfying? Not the average Cash fan, who wants a smaller greatest-hits set with more familiar tunes. Not the rabid Cash fan, who probably already has much of this, and might want more well-balanced and thorough boxes, such as those issued on Bear Family of Cash’s early material. It’s for the in-betweeners, who certainly find the more conventional box retrospective The Essential Johnny Cash 1955-1983 the essential first stop.

TRACKS:

ALBUMS

Love (Allmusic 4.5/5 stars link)

TRACKS:

1. “I Walk the Line” (Cash) – 2:46

2. “Oh, What a Dream” (Cash) – 2:03

3. “All Over Again” (Cash) – 2:07

4. “Little at a Time” (Cash, Terry) – 1:57

5. “My Old Faded Rose” (Cash, Cash) – 2:53

6. “Happiness Is You” (Cash, Cash) – 2:57

7. “Flesh and Blood” (Cash) – 2:40

8. “I Tremble for You” (Cash, DeWitt) – 2:15

9. “I Feel Better All Over” (Rogers, Smith) – 2:04

10. “‘Cause I Love You” (Cash) – 1:47

11. “Ballad of Barbara” (Cash) – 3:49

12. “Ring of Fire” (Carter, Kilgore) – 2:39

13. “My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You” (Ross, Wills) – 2:26

14. “While I’ve Got It on My Mind” (Cash) – 2:21

15. “I Still Miss Someone” (Cash, Cash) – 2:35

16. “The One Rose (That’s Left in My Heart)” (Lyon, McIntire) – 2:27

God (Allmusic 3.5/5 stars link)

Another feature of Cash’s career is his affinity for another type of album centered around a single topic: gospel albums. God pulls from a vast catalog of spiritual songs that includes the albums Hymns by Johnny Cash (1959), Hymns from the Heart (1962), Sings Precious Memories (1975), Believe in Him (1986) and My Mother’s Hymn Book (2004).